Chopin’s melodic inventiveness emerges in the piano, as the soloist repeats the main themes before introducing virtuoso figurations and ornaments. - Interlude (Profil)

Volume 5 of Profil's Günter Wand Edition is devoted to Carl Orff's massive and enormously popular cantata, Carmina Burana, in a stirring radio performance presented with the NDR Sinfonieorchester in 1984. (Profil)

The familiar in a new guise – Tatjana Masurenko and the Yaruss Quartet are therefore in good company when they clothe the music of the Russian Romantics in novel acoustic garments. Using viola, soprano domra and alto domra, accordion and double bass, they play 19th century works in their own arrangements, using gut strings for all of their instruments, the domras sounding somewhat like Italian mandolins. In this guise, compositions by Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Borodin and Glazunov seem lighter, more open and agile, their music expressing a fresh elegance with different colours, taking on a completely new character.

Anton Bruckner 200 (1824-2024)

Günter Wand (1912-2002) left us dozens of gramophone records: complete symphonic cycles and impressive live recordings of his concerts with the NDR Symphony Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. The archetypical anti-star all his life and for that very reason under-appreciated, this conductor only attained international recognition in his old age as an unequalled interpreter of classical music. Accordingly, most of these multiple-award-winning benchmark recordings date from his later years.

Günter Wand´s Bruckner recordings are critically acclaimed; this is a best-of-collection of his legendary Bruckner-Interpretations (1985 - 2000) on 8 CDs.

REVIEWS:

These could be described as the canonical recordings of Bruckner's symphonies. They date from 1985 to 2000 with two perfect orchestras and a conductor who is as if we were saying the composer's own classicism. Wand always chooses the original versions. The first symphonies are missing (zero, one and two), but they are not essential. Ideal for getting started seriously in Bruckner.

-- Scherzo

Wieland Wagner's production of Parsifal was performed at the Bayreuth Festival every year from 1951 to 1973. This makes it the longest-running production of Parsifal on the Bayreuth programme following the world premiere of 1882, which ran until 1933. Wagner’s opera opened the first post-war festival on the 30th of July, 1951, the day after the former Bayreuthian Wilhelm Furtwängler had performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

REVIEWS:

Hans Knappertsbusch led Wagner’s Parisfal at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 and 1952, and then annually from 1954 through 1964. For some reason his August 16, 1955 performance has never surfaced on CD until now, and it’s one of Kna’s stronger Parsifals.

Tempos are generally faster and more fluid than in the commercial 1951 recording. Compare the Act 1 Prelude’s Grail theme and the Transformation music, the Act 2 Flowermaiden’s scene, and the Act 3 Good Friday Spell in both recordings, and you’ll hear what I mean. Furthermore, Act 1’s recalcitrant bells had been replaced by 1955 with an electronic version that was reliable in intonation yet made less sonorous and majestic an impact.

One can argue that 1955’s cast is the most consistently satisfying out of all the Kna Bayreuth Parsifals, with no weak links. Ludwig Weber reprises his distinctive and lieder-like Gurnemanz from 1951. Hermann Uhde’s heavy voice is better suited to Titurel’s gravitas here than Klingsor’s malevolence in 1951. 1955 features Gustav Neidlinger’s Klingsor, which is as riveting a piece of vocal acting as his legendary Alberich in Das Rheingold.

Ramón Vinay sings rather than barks the title role, and the unforced lyricism of his top notes seems to spur on Martha Mödl to deliver her best all-around Act 2 Kundry. True, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Amfortas abounds with sibilantly snarling consonants, but he’s in fresher, more agile voice than in his 1972 studio Amfortas under Georg Solti.

-- ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

Bruckner’s Fifth is eminently suited to an arrangement for performance on the organ above all because of its musical texture. In no other Bruckner symphony, for example, does counterpoint play such an important part. I am thinking in particular of the great fugue in the final movement. It really does seem as if many passages of this magnificent work were composed as if with the organ in mind, even though the Fifth is not a piece for organ at all, being in the first place a symphonic work. And yet it lends itself admirably to the extraction of a compositional substrate with no loss of essential content. That cannot be said of all Bruckner’s symphonies. Of all his symphonies, in my opinion, the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth are most amenable to an arrangement for organ. Building on the compositional core, it is the orchestral treatment above all that plays a key role. If this is lacking, an arrangement of the work can deprive the work of its grandeur. That is again at risk if one attempts to copy the orchestra or to transpose certain orchestral effects one-to-one onto the organ. Such an approach is generally unsatisfactory, because organ writing is governed by different rules than those applying to orchestral scoring. It would be fatal to make the organ rival the orchestra. My aim from the start was to avoid imitating the orchestra and to create a work specifically for organ in the manner of an organ symphony.

Mozart created 22 stage works in his lifetime. This 10 CD box comprises the world-famous ‘evergreens’ in historical recordings from Vienna 1955. Soloists are Christa Ludwig, Lisa Della Casa, Hilde Gülden, Alfred Poell, Cesare Siepi, Fernando Corena, Kurt Böhme and many more.

REVIEW:

Böhm's conducting creates a slim, fluid Mozart sound in which the dynamic pendulum could swing a little more impulsively here and there, but which still has an instinctive feel for theatrical and dramaturgical diction on the one hand and interaction with the singers on the other.​

-- Klassik.com

Ivry Gitlis, born in Haifa on August 22, 1922, is often referred to as “the great free spirit” among the violin virtuosi of the 20th century; and by that is meant both the selection of his repertoire and his general interpretation. The first signs of this had already been noticed by the great Bronislaw Huberman, who heard the 10-year-old and recommended him to the Paris Conservatoire. Just three years later, Gitlis won first prize there. In the following years his talent was brought out by, among others, Carl Flesch, Jacques Thibaud and George Enescu. His incipient career was interrupted by the Second World War, which Gitlis spent in England – firstly as a worker in a munitions factory, then later as a pianist at numerous concerts put on for allied soldiers. His concert programmes were often challenging for the audience – among them the latest musical creations of Bruno Maderna and Yannis Xenakis, seldom-heard compositions by Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky and Ernest Bloch, and Bela Bartok's last completed work – his Sonata for Solo Violin. Nevertheless, when Gitlis plays the great concertos whose timeless worth still dominates today's concert programmes, his own, sometimes idiosyncratic interpretation is audible, challenging the listener to more intensive engagement with that which is already well-known.

Essentially, in the incredible ease and naturalness of his pianism, in the unassuming simplicity and absorption of the man, Backhaus was much the same artist and personality then. And he was far from unknown. Even before he won the Rubinstein Prize in 1905, Backhaus was internationally celebrated as a prodigious virtuoso. Backhaus never failed to win a succès d'estime among professional musicians. They always knew his qualities, always marveled at his instrumental perfection, his titanic mastery that scorned every complexity, his unsurpassed freedom and endurance. There was never a time when Backhaus could not toss off any or all of the Chopin études or the Brahms-Paganini variations with an imperturbable calm, an implacable security that left one open-mouthed. Not everyone, for only the pianists really knew what was happening before their eyes and ears, knew how to measure such achievement. There they all sat, in breathless astonishment and envy and despair. Backhaus was a shy, unaffected, recessive personality whose sensational capacities were so unsensationally projected that lay audiences remained totally unconscious of his fabulous accomplishments. (Gerhard Melchert)

Petersen's Third Symphony in C sharp minor received its premiere in 1934 under the baton of Karl Friderich in Darmstadt; a further performance followed on September 24, 1935, under Hermann Abendroth in Berlin. The present recording is the first to have been made of this work. Petersen wrote a short factual commentary on his Third Symphony for the September 1935 issue of the Zeitschrift für Musik. Only in a few places does the text depart from a dispassionate sequence of events and indicate the “content” of the music, with such terms as “tragic climax”, “breakdown”, “tender transfiguration”.

The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy was born in Temesvár, then in Hungary, today in Romania, on October 26, 1924, and was hailed as a wunderkind. At the age of seven, she became the last pupil to be taken under the wing of the great violin teacher Jenö Hubay, who had enabled artists like Joseph Szigeti and Sándor Végh to fly high. Ferenc Gabriel continued the girl's training after Hubay's death, helping her to win first prize at the Hubay Competition when she was seventeen. She took up studies at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest the following year and made her orchestral debut with the Tchaikovsky Concerto under the baton of Willem Mengelberg a year later. When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Johanna Martzy and her husband Béla Szillery fled via Austria and France to Switzerland. There she won the Concours International d'Exécution Musicale in Geneva in 1947, and her international career gradually gained momentum. She began making gramophone records in 1950; Ferenc Fricsay's recording of the Dvorák concerto for Deutsche Grammophon of 1953 is notable for its rousing intensity and still enjoys benchmark status. In 1954 and 1955 EMI's legendary record producer Walter Legge made the recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin presented here.

In spite of a successful concert comeback in the 1960s, she was no longer in the top flight. It seems symbolical that it was in Budapest that she discovered she had hepatitis in 1969. Johanna Martzy steadily grew weaker and died in Switzerland on August 13, 1979, a year after the death of her husband. The present recordings remain a rare attestation of the brilliance of Johanna Martzy's playing, and it ensures her everlasting fame, at least among connoisseurs.

REVIEW:

The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy, who died in Zurich in 1979 at the age of only 54, experienced a short, steep international career at the beginning of the 1950s. She has remained an icon for insiders to this day and is considered the last great representative of the Hungarian violin school.

Profil has now refreshed the majority of their EMI recordings plus two Yellow Label concertos produced in 1952 and 1953 by Mozart (KV 218) under Jochum and the legendary Dvořák concerto under Fricsay and packed them into a 6-CD box set. The EMI bundle includes the two concertos by Brahms (1954) and Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1955) recorded with Paul Kletzki, which are still among the most expressive interpretations of the entire discography, as well as Schubert's (almost) complete works for violin and piano, and then also her legendary Abbey Road recordings of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas.

Martzy embodies the romantic Bach conception of the time, which aims for intensity, expressiveness, and flowing legato, and an aesthetic that wants to overwhelm the listener with beauty and dramatic stringency. At the same time, on her full-bodied, almost viola-like sonorous Bergonzi violin from 1733, she ignites such an inner fervor and draws such arcs of suspense that one cannot evade her infinitely spun, plastic lines. Every single tone is suggestively shaped and part of the flowing universe: drama and logic in one. And with the changing keys it also changes the respective basic color of its tone, i.e. from the darkened sonority of the D minor partita to the radiantly bright E major of the third partita. You can feel the objective and subjective power of this music at every moment: they are monologues of harrowing beauty.

Her interpretations of the concertos by Mozart, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Brahms and Dvořák, glowing with intensity, shine as flawlessly clean, full-bodied and sonorous and at the same time as inwardly lively, as passionately urgent and lyrically shaped - she practices a kind of musical perfection that everyone Leaving virtuosity behind, proclaimed as a means to penetrate to the true inner, to the glowing human message, to enchant and shake us with pure, flowing heart energy. It's no wonder that Johanna Martzy enjoys iconic status in professional circles and that the few original LPs that have survived are sold at top prices.

-- Rondo (Germany, Attila Csampai)

Clara Haskil was throughout her life a sensitive, empathetic and intelligent pianist with enormous expressive power. At the same time she was particularly modest: she was able to subordinate herself both to the composers whose works she performed and to the chamber musicians who partnered her, never placing herself center stage, but serving the music first and foremost. Clara Haskil is acknowledged as a great Mozart pianist (see albums 1 to 3), but she also left a significant legacy in her interpretation of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Schumann. Her favorite duet partners were Pau Casals, George Enescu, Géza Anda and especially Arthur Grumiaux, with whom she recorded all of Beethoven’s violin sonatas. This recording presents a few samples of their duo recordings.

REVIEW:

The Romanian-Swiss pianist Clara Haskil is considered one of the most important Mozart interpreters of all time. This is also evident from this release, half of the program of which is dedicated to Mozart.

When one speaks of Clara Haskil, one inevitably thinks of her wonderful Mozart recordings with Ferenc Fricsay, Igor Markevitch and violinist Arthur Grumiaux. Her Mozart continues to have a timeless beauty that has defied all the trends of the past decades. Haskil’s interpretations have not aged; the playing is as fresh and honest as on the first day. Mozart’s music resounds with a matter-of-factness, an unerring sense of the essential that few artists have.

But there is also something strangely compelling about Haskil’s Beethoven. This is evident in these recordings with the Third Piano Concerto and in the sonatas.

The Schumann solo pieces date from the early 1950s and are distinguished by subtle nuances and tonal beauty.

The unaffected simplicity of these interpretations gives Schumann’s music a very distinctive eloquence.

-- Pizzicato

Carl Meisl's play The Consecration of the House, to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, was performed in Vienna on October 3, 1822 on the occasion of the reopening of the Theater in der Josefstadt. Its theme is the reawakening of art after times of crisis. Beethoven's music to August von Kotzebue's text The Ruins of Athens (1812) served as the basis for the work, and was adapted to Meisl’s text as well as expanded to include new music by the composer. Beethoven seems to have started composing for the upcoming performance only in September 1822, writing new music for those of Meisl’s texts for which nothing suitable could be found in The Ruins of Athens. The dance with chorus “Wo sich die Pulse jugendlich jagen” is listed separately as WoO (work without opus number) 98, as is the March, op. 114, which was reworked for the play. The overture achieved a high degree of popularity. Its prominent position as a separate opus (124) between the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony reveals that Beethoven likely approved its use as a concert overture.

Bruckner's music embodies the visions of a devout, ordinary man. Parts of his expansive, shimmering musical landscapes are influenced by Wagner, but one can also detect Schubert, who began life in similar circumstances. The reposeful piety which runs through Bruckner's symphonic spectrum lends his music its unique power of attraction.

Recorded 1975-76.

For a long time Johannes Brahms was considered the epitome of conservatism, who, contrary to the disciples of Wagner and Liszt, fell back on old forms, which allegedly had no power anymore. Indeed, Brahms was an expert on music of the past, going back till the polyphonic composers of the 16th century. He made use of old patterns such as the variation and the interrelated passacaglia. He adopted the traditional four-movement symphony and its juxtaposition, respected the pattern of the sonata form and did hardly go beyond Beethoven when it came to instrumentation. However, the perception of Brahms as a “reactionary”, as it was initially argued by Nietzsche and later by the circle of Wagner and Richard Strauss, is unsustainable. No one less than Arnold Schoenberg has recognized the fundamentally different, which divided the composer Brahms, particularly as composer of symphonies, from the masters of the classical sonata and symphony in his famous paper “Brahms, der Fortschrittliche” (Brahms the Progressive)

Recorded 1974-75.